June 16th 2015
I have begun the process of translating the vectors measured in Churchill into virtual space. It has seemed to take an enormous amount of time to develop the mental space to undertake and I am not entirely able to identify why this was. It feels as if i has been an evolution in my perception of space or at least my ability to think about space and perspective.
Now that I am into the process what is becoming evident is that I lack the capacity or more specifically interest to design exclusively from a formal place. I am realizing that I desire art on some level to function rather than to express. This somewhat archaic notion is not to invalidate work that exists otherwise but at very least explains the curious aesthetic likenesses between Russian Constructivism and the images and devices that I have previously made.
To this point all of my design has been shaped by function primarily and now I find that I must invoke a function to find a form. It is interesting to consider that perhaps I am developing a practice of designing aesthetic functions. That the functions perhaps posses a formal or aesthetic value constructed by their architectures of energy input and output relations. The actualization of the function into mechanism creates an external form that is a second order echo of the functional relations of the mechanism and its limitations.
So what will the functions of the Churchill sites be? I had thought of exploring telematic arms but the shape and scale of the sites do not lend themselves easily to a large scale apparatus, at least one that interacts with the atmosphere. The thing that I find most compelling about the architecture at the Churchill Rocket range is the sense of a technological psychology that I feel from it. The site is a significant part of the 20th century space race but the mind space that i feel there is a mentality of scale and metal, attempting to evoke the movement of physical the physical world toward transcendence and hope …
In order to complete the CAD designs for the various sites I will need to determine the way in which I will translate the surveying data that I have collected in to 3D Models that I can augment with the future technologies.
Thus far I have collected Site and Azimuth data from a series of points at each location. This data has been recorded on pencil sketches that will be used to construct basic wire-frames of the sites.
Here are a series of drawings and data collected from two buildings at the Churchill Rocket Range :
